NYC kitchen Empowers West African Migrants with Food, Training, and Hope
AMY GOODMAN: let’s turn to a story right here, not far from Democracy Now!‘s studios. As New Yorkers protest escalating ICE raids in the city, some are also volunteering to support newly arrived migrants and asylum seekers, including those from West Africa. I want to turn to a report by Democracy Now!‘s Messiah Rhodes.
MESSIAH RHODES: We’re here in front of Plado, where Cafewal weekday kitchen provides over 150 meals a day.With its origins in supporting West African migrants escaping political oppression and violence from their home country, as well as the violence of colonialism as they journey to the United States, Cafewal provides a warm meal and a safe haven for West African migrants just newly arriving in new York City.
TYLER HEFFERON: So, my name is Tyler Hefferon. I’m the executive director of EVLovesNYC. We are a institution founded back in 2020 with a mission to fight food insecurity all over New York City. In our third year of operations, we started to work with a lot of refugee and asylum seeker populations coming through the city-run St. Brigid migrant reticketing center in the East Village. And at that point, we began to meet a lot of asylum seekers from West Africa who were coming over as single adults to seek asylum from their respective countries.
So, from ther, what we started to do is we opened a volunteer program focused on asylum seekers to get them the letters they needed to stay in the New York City shelter system. That began in Ramadan of 2024, where we invited the handful of people that we had been meeting on a close basis to come into our kitchen and prepare authentic West African meals. they just sent us the ingredients. They knew all the recipes by heart, and it was some of their favorite childhood dishes from back home. So, it was a really fun week where every night we would prepare a iftar meal for a different mosque or community organization serving hundreds of New Yorkers who were observing fasting during Ramadan. And that sort of began this impromptu restaurant training program.
About six months later, we founded a full-time kitchen called Cafewal, which means “cafeteria” in the Fulani language. That’s developed to a fuller-scale workforce training program, where the hope is that the people that are getting paid wages to work in our kitchen are getting ready to work in some of your favorite restaurants around New York City. So, we work with different mutual aids, like East Village Neighbors Who Care, to help them with the different supporting services, like English lessons, résumé writing, job applications, all those different supports that we take for granted here as citizens, in addition to the workforce training that they’re receiving in the kitchen every day.
ABDUL KARIM: My name is Abdul Karim. I’m from Guinea. I have been in the Cafewal seven months. I’m cooking here rice and chicken, the salad, the potato.
MESSIAH RHODES: What future do you see in the United States?
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Protecting Immigrant Workers in New York City
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today looking at the situation facing immigrant workers in New York City, as the Biden management continues to deport people, and as the threat of ICE raids looms large. we go now to a report from Democracy Now!‘s Messiah Rhodes, Safwat Nazzal and Robby Karran, who recently traveled to Guatemala, where they spoke with families impacted by U.S. immigration policies.
MESSIAH RHODES: We’re in Guatemala City, and we’re speaking with a woman named Maria. She asked that we not use her last name for fear of retribution. She tells us her son was deported from the United States after living there for 20 years. He had two children, a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old, who are now U.S. citizens. She says he was a hard worker, had no criminal record, but was caught up in a sweep by ICE.
MARIA (translated): He was a good father. He worked every day to provide for his children. Now, they are without their father, and I am without my son. It is a great pain.
SAFWAAT NAZZAL: Maria’s story is not unique.We spoke with dozens of families who have been separated by U.S. immigration policies. Many of them say their loved ones were deported for minor offenses, or simply as they were undocumented. And in many cases, the deportations have had devastating consequences for families, leaving children without parents and communities without vital members.
ROBBY KARRAN: We also visited a shelter for deported migrants in Guatemala City. The conditions there are dire. people are living in overcrowded conditions, with limited access to food, water and medical care. Many of them are traumatized by their experiences, and have nowhere to go.
DEPORTED MIGRANT (translated): I left everything behind in the United States. My job, my home, my friends. Now, I am here, with nothing. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
MESSIAH RHODES: The Guatemalan government has been criticized for not doing enough to protect the rights of deported migrants. Human rights groups say that migrants are often subjected to abuse and exploitation by authorities, and that there is a lack of accountability for these abuses. They say the Guatemalan police routinely extort them with impunity. They beat them regularly. They have what they call enforced disappearances, where they are taken away from their homes and the families don’t know where they are, and usually have no opportunities to reclaim their bodies after they’ve found out that they were dead. This goes on all the time, and there is no recourse, doesn’t seem to be any kind of pressure for this to abate. So,this results in a lot of refugees coming to the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Special thanks to Democracy Now!‘s Messiah Rhodes, Safwat Nazzal and Robby Karran for that report.
On Tuesday, I got a chance to ask New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani about protecting workers from ICE.
AMY GOODMAN: Zohran, can I ask a question about – many of the workers in this city are immigrants. when you met with President Trump, did you get a concession from him around ICE raids and not moving into this city?
MAYOR-ELECT ZOHRAN MAMDANI: When I met with the president, I made very clear that these kinds of raids are cruel and inhumane, that they are raids that do nothing to serve the interests of public safety, and that my responsibility is to be the mayor to each and every person that calls this city their home, and that includes millions of immigrants, of which I am one. And I am proud that I will be the frist immigrant mayor of the city in generations,and prouder still for the fact that I will live up to the statue that we have in our harbor and the ideals which we have long proclaimed as being those of the city,but which have too frequently enough been ones we do not actually enforce and celebrate on a daily basis. And that is
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